Your AWS bill is lying to you — it shows services, not features

Short summary

AWS bills show service costs, not product-feature costs. When this company's bill jumped $34K/month, they couldn't trace it to specific features—only to Lambda, RDS, EC2. They fixed it by implementing AWS Cost Allocation Tags by feature and X-Feature-Context headers in requests, enabling cost attribution at the product level via Cost Explorer API.

• •AWS observability is service-centric, not feature-centric—a common blind spot for scaling SaaS
• •Cost Allocation Tags + X-Feature-Context headers enable product-level cost tracking
• •Retroactively correlating bill spikes to releases is unreliable; architect cost visibility upfront

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